Good Intentions Not Enough To Benefit Listeners

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, October 22, 2000

VARIOUS ARTISTS

VARIOUS ARTISTS

PAVAROTTI & FRIENDS

For Cambodia and Tibet Uni/Decca, $17.97
You could make a pretty tough geography quiz out of the beleaguered places that have inspired pop stars to make benefit records: Bosnia, East Timor, Kampuchea. Certainly the pop stars themselves would have difficulty finding them on a map.

Yet it's always the little people who get the stars' attention. You don't see Bono lobbying to relieve Russia's debt.

Two new benefit records are raising money for the people of Tibet; funds from a third go to the farmers of America. The causes couldn't be more noble. As usual, the music couldn't be more of an afterthought.

Theoretically, knowing that some of your money will go to a good cause is supposed to help you make that impulse buy at the record store. However, the quality of the music rarely puts the transaction over the top.

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There are moments of interest on these new CDs. (There are always moments.) On "Mantra Mix," a self- described "once-in-a-lifetime" collection, Ben Harper's "One Road to Freedom" is appropriately stirring. It's also previously available, on his second album.

Travis' "The Connection," a pretty anachronism previously unavailable in the United States, is one of just a few tracks that might be hard to find outside this compilation. Be honest, now: Was anybody breathlessly awaiting the minimalist trip- hop version of Peter Gabriel's "Games Without Frontiers"?

Hard to believe, but the Farm Aid collection, two discs' worth, is the organization's first recording after 15 years in existence. It collects some of the annual concert's better performances over the years, including pointed numbers from co- founders Willie Nelson ("City of New Orleans," with the Highwaymen), Neil Young ("Homegrown," with Crazy Horse) and John Mellencamp ("Rain on the Scarecrow").

It also features one of the more inspired duets in recent memory -- Nelson with that noted font of sincerity Beck, on the old Jimmie Rodgers yodeler "Peach Picking Time Down in Georgia." That track alone makes this set worth hunting down for at least a few curiosity seekers.

But the rest of these fields have been harvested before. Live versions of familiar songs by Dwight Yoakam, the Dave Matthews Band and Susan Tedeschi are nice but hardly essential. Nor is "essential" quite the word for the latest in Luciano Pavarotti's long line of all-star hootenannies. Unless, of course, your thing is farce.

This time the big man hosts a fund-raiser for Tibet and Cambodia. The mood swings are astounding, from the Barbie-doll group Aqua joining Pavarotti on "Funiculi Funicula" to George Michael soliciting sympathy in a public place on "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime."

No denying, it's easier to be a critic than it is to be constructive. But a just cause does not a great performance make.

On rare occasions, benefit albums have broken a little musical ground. Pearl Jam had a surprise hit with its live cover of the oldies weeper "Last Kiss" on last year's "No Boundaries" compilation for the Kosovar refugees. George Harrison's "Concert for Bangla Desh," generally cited as the granddaddy of the genre, featured a standout performance by Bob Dylan, who had been on hiatus from the stage for some time before the event. And the "Red Hot" series of records benefiting AIDS research have updated concepts from Cole Porter to bossa nova with consistent aplomb.

But mostly, benefit CDs don't do the causes justice. There is, after all, precious little justice in this world.

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